Sunday, July 31, 2011

“Now it happens that in thiscountry (Japan) the empireof signifiers is so immense,so in excess of speech, thatthe exchange of signs remainsof a fascinating richness,mobility, and subtlety, despitethe opacity of the language,sometimes even as aconsequence of that opacity.”—Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs

Cornell’s boxes can be seen as looking thru windows or screens into living worlds of the surrealist imagination—counterfoils to the vague & excessively stupid juxtapositions commonly known as Hollywood movie “reality.”

William Carlos Williams zeroes in on Charles Henri Ford & Parker Tyler’s “The Young and Evil” very quickly—finding Ford’s poetics alluding to something very interesting in Breton’s First Manifesto.

Parker Tyler gives it a filmic twist—as Cornell does with “Rose Hobart” (1936). The same with Kenneth Anger & Jack Smith continuing the automatic project— something like “worm-holing” deeper into the Black Hole of the surrealist imagination.

But for me—Cornell’s elegant “freeze-frame,” “stop-action” “readymade” boxes are along the same lines—a way of continuing the Surreal Group’s irrational enlargement research on a low-key “white magic” level there in his Flushing NYC basement studio.

As opposed to the political, more socially-engaged, supposedly “automatic” method of imaging & filmmaking—along the lines of Breton’s European “black magic” surrealist group aesthetic.

Joseph Cornell seems to me to be more down-to-earth, more introspective—and less radically committed to an agenda of social change/revolution coming out of Paris between wars & after WWII.

I do see a certain amount of social commitment to social change in the Third World by the surrealists other than Paris—like Buñuel in Mexico City with “Los Olvidados” (1950).

What could be more surrealistic than the tall unfinished skyscrapers as backdrops—to the squalor, poverty & death of the Mexican squalid ghetto. With Roberto Cobo as El Jaibo—the young gangster hood who barely survives, using, killing & intimidating those around him, only to finally get it in the end.

But the American surrealists like Jack Smith can be equally as revealing in regard to the denizens of New York City—with his flamboyantly kitschy camp automatic filmmaking like “Flaming Creatures” (1963).

Along with the other underground NYC cinema intelligentsia back then during the Midnight Movie Sixties—that still appeal to my somewhat perverted, transgressive, gay-noir sensibility; although Smith’s f flaming surreal filmmaking seems rather all-consuming, exhausting & self-destructive to me.

I think I prefer Cornell’s Flushing NYC Utopian Drive basement studio environment—with his readymade boxed “obtuse” filmic research going on down there into the surreal realm of images both stills & movies.

The boxes don’t “gloss” the filmic images—which illustrate the movie. There’s a visual uncertainty analogous to the “loss of meaning” that Zen calls “satori.”

The boxes full of images interlace with each other—seeking to ensure the circulation & exchange of different signifiers: body, face, expression. And I like the way Cornell uses readymade objects & images to read the retreat of signs into a filmic world.

If I want to imagine a filmic world—I could give it an invented name. And treat it declaratively as a cinematic project. I could create a new mise-en-scene—according to my fantasy. And let the surrealist imagination—take it from there.

My fantasy so-called surreal screenplay—gets compromised by certain signs of cinema. I can isolate them thru certain gestures in my discourse—a certain number of features out of a film repertoire. It is this system which I’ll call: my surreal Filmography.

Someday I’ll write the history of my own obscurity—manifest the queerness of my nelly narcissism, tally down thru the years the several appeals to butchy heterosexuality I’ve occasionally noticed about the world.

The ideological recuperations which could or would infallibly follow from such a project—consisting in always acclimating my incognizance of Straights by means of certain foreign gestures, attitudes, signs.

As strange to me as Japan was to Barthes—is how I’d approach and attempt to understand the haughty almost Asiatic Land of Heterosexuality. Such as “The Orient” of Voltaire, the Revue Asiatique of Pierre Loti or an Air France brochure.

Even today there are doubtless a thousand things to learn about the Straights: an enormous labor of sexual knowledge is & would be necessary—its delay has already resulted in a rather severe ideological occultation on my part.

This fissure appears on the level of the filmic—it pertains to gay urbanism, domestic things like gay cooking & controversial gay marriage issues. I’ve never been straight—I’ve always been just the surreal opposite. Although from my present-day POV—it increasingly seems like Straights have a monopoly on American surreal cosmopolitan society.

I’ve had a number of straight “flashes.” Or better yet Straightville has presented now & then, here & there—a certain level of primal straight cultural production that I detest. The Straights have afforded me many situations—for my own readymade tacky kitschy screenplays in boxes like Cornell’s basement factory of Pandora’s boxes.

All of Cornell’s boxes being closet-case memoirs & ticky-tack touchstones of fag nostalgia—according to many esteemed nincompoop art critics in the burgeoning cottage industry known as the Cornell Art School Racket.

This sort of situation is the kind in which a certain disturbance of the film critic occurs—a subversion of earlier screenplays, a shock of gay meaning lacerated by homophobic moviegoers, extenuating circumstances to the point of expanding into a ridiculous, irreplaceable void—without the object’s ever ceasing to be significant, desirable, of course.

Screenwriting is after all, in its way, a “satori”—in the Zen sense of “occurrence” which can be more or less powerful, though in no way formal, causing knowledge or vacillation or running-away from something. Usually because it creates an emptiness of language—a void in terms of screenwriting. An empty box with frames inside—waiting for some idiot savant or child idiot to come along & cram everything including the kitchen sink into the sullen, empty box of dreams.

3

The Zen Box

It’s like a Cornell empty “box”—demonstrating its lack of features as its strength. An empty box full of Zen—which exempts itself from all narrative meaning, concentrates instead on objects, gestures, kitsch flower arrangements, faces, birds, momentary tidbits of the zeitgeist.

Automatic images happen in dreams—inside the empty box of our sleepy heads. What sometimes makes dreams so foreign & difficult to understand— is the lack of nexus, the crazy way dream scenes don’t form connecting filmic threads, the confusing lucidity of sometimes finding oneself in medias res nude or lost in a foreign city or confronted with hostile strangers.

Automatic images belong to an unknown language—to dream is to know a foreign (alien) language & yet not understand it. To perceive the difference between dreaming & waking consciousness—is to recuperate a different kind of the sociality of discourse, a communication with the vulgarity that so well portrays who we are in dreams.

Dreams seem to be like movies—but to know, positively refracting oneself in a new language, the impossibility of being who we are & learning the systematics of this inconceivable other world often seems beyond us.

To undo our own “reality” & place ourselves under the effects of other linguistic formulations, other syntaxes—is to descend into the untranslatable, to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to experience the shock value of sudden lucidity while fucking something up…

Until everything conscious in us seems to totter & the rights of the Queen’s English vacillate in some dark Congo River African night—only then does the tongue which comes to us thru society & supposedly helps us finding out how the world & ourselves tick fail.

As we find ourselves isolated in the natural/unnatural anti-social unconscious imagery of the living dead—we sense that the chief concepts of Aristotelian philosophy & Greek language no longer helps us to“constrain” how we think & help us in what we say.

Often in dreams there is no speech or verbal communication going on “aloud” anywhere—but rather there’s an inner monologue with ourselves. And depending how supposedly “lucid” we are—sometimes there’s a telepathic sense going on with ourselves & others. A sense matching the whole oneiric silent-movie scenario that the dream experience portrays—that parlays itself beyond itself into our rather dull waking moments & semi-awake remembrance of that Other narrative.

Are the Sapir or Whorf discussions about Chinook, Nootka, Hopi languages or Granet on Chinese really any different—and intellectually as relevant in this Other automatic realm of dreaming where gestures & telepathy rule rather than simply verbal intercourse & gangster mobster bankster gestures by heavies like in film noir moves?

Does Other dreaming open up a filmic realm of surreal texts that permits us to read the filmscript & auteur screenplay directions like some Bijou inner landscape or boxed readymade reality principle? Who are these Other people, objects & scenes—that proliferate with a functionality & complexity that advances on its own Hidden Agenda without us?

Sometimes we’re aware of inner precautions, repetitions, delays and insistencies within this Otherness—other times for some reason or intuitively we seem to know this Otherness without the usual melodramatic or romantic Hollywood soundtrack on the screen.

Sometimes this Otherness—creates its own envelope empty of speech as we know it without that dense semantic kernel which is supposed to direct our sentences. From outside & from above—from inside & from below. So sometimes it seems to us—like an excess of subjectivity articulating our impressions, not “Just the facts, Madam” affidavits.

Our heads seem to be empty boxes when we go to bed & sleep for 8 hours. And then some kind of strange surreal brain activity happens—diluting, hemorrhaging our subjectivity into fragmented, disjunctive, perhaps even into some kind of kitschy film noir “Detour” or “Double Indemnity” postmodern emptiness?

We’re unable to distinguish human (human and/or alien) from animal behavior—notably on the level of the verbs “to be”—and the filmic production of characters introduced into the movie being assigned the form of people we know. While the rest of us struggles & tries to enforce a meaningful Aristotelian storyline on the Id mess—some kind of alibi for faking or finding ourselves in the middle of this theta wave Zen nothingness.

How can we imagine a verb which is simultaneously without knowing subject & without known objects?How can we conceive without attribute & yet transitive verbs—an instance of radical reality without our language to guide us? Yet it’s this Other linguistic imagination that requires us—to face the Hindu “dhyana,” origin of the Chinese “ch’an” and the Japanese “zen” which we find ourselves in while in the empty box of our dreams. Can anything be learned about this Other—through Joseph Cornell’s surrealist imagination—and his readymade “boxes” down there in his Flushing NY basement studio?

If the surreal didn’t exist—then Cornell would have to invent it. Not that his boxes—are vast lordly Empires of Signs. But rather they’re of his devising—with an innerness that’s has no fate, no ego, no meaning, no grandeur, no metaphysics, no promotional fever. Cornell’s boxes are places where meaning is banished—at least momentarily.

He wanted to imagine a filmic fiction—an invented, novelistic cinema. Belonging to no real country—no fantasy based on literature. He didn’t claim the boxes represented or analyzed reality itself—none of the usual major gestures of Western discourse. He isolated something East of Borneo—a certain eclipsed room for Rose Hobart to silently be herself.

Thru the looking-glass—behind the screen. A different kind of surreal phantom audition existing with images—a surrealistic alibi for performing filmic fiction.

Friday, July 29, 2011

“A large box is handily madeof what is necessary to replaceany substance. Suppose anexample is necessary, theplainer it is made the morereason there is for someoutward recognition thatthere is a result.”—GertrudeStein, “A Box,” Tender Buttons

Cornell’s boxes aren’t necessarily closets—they don’t enclose, they open up things. They bring about an outward recognition of things—like Barthes’ obtuse filmic third meanings.

So that Cornell’s “Rose Hobart” is a surreal readymade montage box—very much like Brian Frye says in his review:

“In Rose Hobart, Cornell holds Hobart in a state of semi-suspension, turning the film itself into a sort of box. She moves her hands, shifts her gaze, gestures briefly, smiles enigmatically, perhaps steps slightly to the side, and little more. The world appears as a sort of strange theatre, staged for her alone.”

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2001/cteq/hobart/

Some critics see Cornell’s boxes as closets—while others see his boxes like Stein saw boxes in Tender Buttons. As “an increase,” “the other,” an “outward recognition,” a “singular arrangement to make four necessary,” as a “doubling,” as “winged,” as “a choice,” as a “spark brighter,” as a “result hardly more than ever.”

Rather than seeing Cornell as a “mystic closet-case” as some critics do—why not think of “Rose Hobart” & Cornell’s readymade surreal boxes as closets opening up? An opening-up of the immediacy of perception—interacting with the world as essential for creative production, releasing us from habitual modes of seeing & opening up a more primordial vision, rather than a closeted closing down?

A common view of Cornell as a “voyeur” stargazing in the closet with his boxes of “found objects”— trapping, capturing, framing & holding their captives tightly away from the world. This POV heightens the sense that some critics have of Cornell as a nostalgic closet-case dreamer trapped in the past & detached from world.

The alternate view of Stein and Ashbery is that Cornell opens up “the unbiased seeing of childhood” again—releasing us from our preconceived biased closeted outlook on experience. This POV comports Cornell as an early classic surrealist—who continues his Surrealist Group “Irrational Enlargement” research into the eclipsing & stargazing at what’s going on around us, sweethearts...

Thursday, July 28, 2011

“The still offers usthe inside of the fragment.”—Roland Barthes,“The Third Meaning,”Image-Music-Text Boxes as "Stills"Cornell’s boxes institute a reading that is at once instantaneous & vertical—it scorns cinematic narrative “talkie” horizontal time.

The boxes are “stills”—still-shots that show us how to dissociate technical restraint from what is cinematically indescribable: the “third meaning.”

The boxes are “silent” screenplays—they’re “stills” from a film that isn’t simply seen & heard cinematically, but rather stops in time & space so that the “fragment” can be scrutinized and listened to attentively.

This seeing & hearing enables the “box” to be a “still” that’s a “ready-made” object, a ready-made scene within a film that exists in a new way, i.e., thru the “third meaning” which is vertical not horizontal narrative.

This Barthes-esque “third meaning” has its own way of structuring the film differently as Cornell does creating his “Rose Hobart” (1936) film out of the “East of Borneo” (1931) talkie motion picture.

Everything that can be said about “East of Borneo” can be said in a written text entitled “Borneo”—except this third or “obtuse” meaning. One can gloss everything in “Borneo” except the obtuse quality of Rose Hobart’s face, her gestures, her actions.

This obtuse filmic lies in the region where Rose Hobart herself pauses, stops, smiles, looks, moves, lives & performs for us her own story—and language or cinematic dialog or the soundtrack can’t really describe this third world of nuanced, obtuse meaning that’s seeable but not describable. Except with Cornell’s surreal aesthetics & readymade filmics..

“The emphatic truth—of gesture in the importantmoments of life”—Baudelaire

Language seems to go thru a dark passage to beauty but the creative act of the filmic itself seems to find a way. Since we’ve been forced to see movies as “talkies” rather than “silent” stills (boxes)—is it any wonder that the filmic should be so rare?

A few flashes come from Cornell’s work—perhaps elsewhere? Not much though—so that one might have to say that the “filmic” doesn’t exist—there’s only “talkie” cinematic language, cinematic narrative, cinematic dialog, cinematic plots, cinematic acting, cinematic direction.

The cinematic isn’t the same as the silent surrealist filmic—it’s as far removed from the filmic as the novelistic is from the novel. Can write & exist in the novelistic—while not writing novels?

Paradoxically, the filmic doesn’t seem to be able to be grasped while its happening, in the movement, in its “motion picture” state—but only as artifact, the “still.” Perhaps Cornell sensed this after “Rose Hobart”—and concentrated on his surreal boxes after that? After Miss Dali acted out her bitch-scene tipping over the projector & then complaining that Cornell had telepathically stolen the same “Rose Hobart” idea for a film from him, well…can one blame Cornell from concentrating on surreal box-art after that?

What is a still? A photo from a film? Something from the pages of Cahiers du cinema? Pictures in a textbook? A department store catalog? A pornographic picture from “My Baby Is Black”?

What if the so-called obtuse filmic lies not in movement or catalogs of picture books or porno? What if a diegetic horizon is needed to “freeze-frame” & configure the filmic mobility theoretically as a framework for a presentational unfolding combining the stills with a story (diegesis) so that a new “third obtuse meaning” is born from the lower depths?

In some ways this has already happened with graphic novels & comix. Such innovations represent the “still-shot” as filmic when “doubled” within a series of frames not necessarily arranged horizontally but rather vertically. As with this Crazy Kat cartoon. Notice it’s vertical storytelling schematic.

The last “still” of Krazy Kat in the pond offers us the inside-story as a fragment of the whole vertical narrative. In this shot the center of gravity is no longer between horizontal frames of other stills but rather “inside the shot”—the accentuation of the last fragment expands the absurdity of the whole story.

This vertical “diegesis-complexity” lies with accentuation within the fragment—as Cornell does with his vertical boxes composed of various “frames.” Each box has a vertical reality of articulation—as opposed to the cinematic horizontal narrative effect.

Cornell’s vertical filmic narrative is at once parodic & absurd. The obtuse or third meaning isn’t “a specimen chemically extracted from the substance of the film,” but rather “a trace of a supercilious bits, hints, clues” experienced in a “stop-action” still-shot.

The “stop-action” still-shot is the fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment. Both film & still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without being o top of each other or extracted from each other. There’s a surreal co-existence of images—doing their Cornell box-thing.

The “still” throws off the constraint of cinematic time—as with Cornell’s boxes which aesthetically as well as technically & theoretically like a silent text or screenplay that’s not committed to logico-temporal order when readymade time is free.

The “still,” Cornell’s boxes, institute a readymade reading at once both instantaneous & vertical—what happens when this happens?

Cornell’s boxes as well as his “Rose Hobart”—perform a vertical mutation of filming degree zero. But what is that?

Boxes & Film

Boxes of wood and glass—Little intricate worlds in a shoebox,With plenty of night & day inside.

When equating a film—with its story & interpretation, is the third meaning, the obtuse meaning, the surrealist meaning lost?

Barthe’s “obtuse meaning”—isn’t that what Cornell does? He has this lover’s discourse, this quarrel with “talkies” cinema as opposed to silent film & stills?

It seems to me to be that way with Cornell’s treatment of the early “talkie” film “”East of Borneo” (1931)—criss-cutting, condensing, removing the sound track. Changing the frame-speed to the silent film level when creating his surreal film “Rose Hobart” (1936).

That & the fact that Cornell spent so much of his life after “Rose Hobart” down in his NYC basement studio constructing his surreal “boxes”—which could very well remind one of movie stills—3D scenes from an ongoing surreal readymade film of his surreal “secret flix” (Jack Smith) imagination.

I see both “Rose Hobart” & Cornell’s boxes as example of Barthes’ “Writing Degree Zero”—in the sense that Barthes’ obtuse and/or third meaning concepts can be applied along the lines of “Filming Degree Zero.”Filming Degree Zero III—for Joseph Cornell

“For most criticism, by equating afilm with its story and interpretationfails to acknowledge that this “third”meaning can exist on any level at all”—Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Barthesand Film,” Placing Movies

This third meaning that Barthes defines as the “obtuse meaning that can proceed only by appearing and disappearing”—what is it?

In some ways isn’t it the face of Garbo, the face of Brigitte Bardot, the face of Audrey Hepburn—and the face of Rose Hobart?

The critical faculty of the moviegoer—isn’t that what’s being invoked in this third obtuse meaning sense in a surreal film or Cornell readymade box?

Loosening the “talkie” cinematic, narcissistic, suspended-belief glue’s grip on filmic consciousness?The hypnosis of verisimilitude, the suspension of disbelief that makes cinema so narcissistic?

Silent film, the still image, Cornell’s readymade boxes—is this the obtuse, third meaningful, perverse way out?

Filming Degree Zero IV—for Joseph Cornell

“When he reached the otherside of the bridge, the phantomscame to greet him.”—F. W. Murnau, Nosferatu (1922)

The idea that surrealist film not only includes “Rose Hobart” (1936)—but the readymade boxes of Joseph Cornell as well... That future cineastes such as Jack Smith would pick up on this filmic idea and use Cornell’s surrealist insights—filming his own degree zero movies like “Flaming Creatures” (1961) in NYC back during the “Midnight Movies” period of experimental American cinema.

The idea of adding kitschy camp to the repertoire of the surreal filmmaking process is nothing new—but American kitsch added gay connotations to surreal cinema very different in many ways from Breton’s patriarchal straight-laced hetero-straitjacketed surrealist manifesto agenda.

Jack Smith’s kitschy surrealism was closer to the Thirties Lesbos-Parisian surrealism of Gertrude Stein-Djuna Barnes-Mina Loy—with such works as “Nightwood,” “The Lost Lunar Baedker” and “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”

The 19-year-old Smith was an usher at the Orpheum Theater in Chicago in 1951—when Maria Montez’s untimely death inspired the management to undertake an extended festival of her films. It was then that Smith fell in love with Montez like Cornell fell in love with Rose Hobart.

Only in America could people believe that Maria Montez was Cobra Woman, Siren of Atlantis and Scheherazade. Jack Smith also became entranced with most Dorothy Lamour sarong flix—in that turbulent Sixties milieu along with other cult film intelligentsia: Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, John Cassavetes, Edgar G. Ulmer, Jonas Mekas, Stan Braklage, Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs, etc.

These filmmakers shared the surrealists’ taste for the tawdry exoticism of despised film genres—junky spectacles, cheap horror flicks, anonymous pornography.

For example, Jack Smith’s “The Perfect Film Appositeness of Maria Montez” argued that the acme of cinematic expressiveness is to be found in a series of exotic, juvenile swashbucklers produced at Universal studios during World War II as vehicles for Maria Montez.

The same with the surrealist’s favorite movie Josef von Sternberg’s “The Shanghai Gesture” (1941)—which they improvised into delirious fantasy elaborations based on their “irrational enlargement” filmic method.

In this Barthesian “obtuse” experimental film treatment of von Sternberg’s classic, the fairly straight hetero Surrealist Group is replaced by other surrealists—and the irrational enlargement shifts to a more perverse, decadent derisory impudent concrete criticism with totally automatic responses, of course, that bein the sole criterion for this study.

What is Poppy’s perversion?

“Clasping an octopus tightly to her distraught pussy with her kimono pulled up & thighs smeared with lots of greasy K-Y.” (LB)

“Stretched out spread-eagled on the green felt of a backroom pool table, as Victor Mature detaches pearl after pearl from Poppy’s damp pouty convulsing pussy.” (JW)

“Poppy has no sexual perversion other than the intense sensuality she gets on a poker table surrounded by cynical Shanghai gangster card players & a cocaine-intoxicated handsome young sailor on a lucky streak.” (JL)

“Fellatio of a self-confessed, intensely masochistic nature beneath a bronze Shiva in the bathroom making the whole gambling joint tremor, premature ejaculations swallowed by greedy goldfish in the nearby toilet bowl, as an octopus winds its tentacles around her legs, while men in the casino suddenly get s whiff of a strange odor of distraught pussy emanating from beneath all the gaming tables with Poppy down there on he knees between the legs of the croupier’s legs. (EW)

“Purposeful masturbation with a peacock feather—that once belonged to Rudolf Valentino and was used by an arrogant smirking slave boy who tortured the Sheik mercilessly in his tent late into the intense desert hashish night there in his secret tent of horrible decadent jaded male desire.” (LB)

“In a Japanese sushi-bar aquarium way down there in the bottom of the sea where sunken Spanish galleons & old Greek temples lollygag in the silent Atlantis seabed abyss of Laundromat dirty gossip, scuttling crabs and the Forty Thieves’ homeboy where Poppy is ravished day & night by hoodlum LA gangs & pimply-faced runaways from the Poughkeepsie suburbs.” (JS)

About as bad as “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”—Reviewed recently by Miss Steve HayesThat “Tired Old Queen” there at the movies.Based on Penelope Gilliatt’s screenplay:Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Head.

Kimba be the cute sullen young brother—Acquanetta the Leopard Skin High PriestessSeducing Bomba into shedding his loinclothRevealing what all of us wanted to see thereDuring hot Bijou Saturday matinee blowjobs.

Cheetah simply gets green with jealousy—Boy going down on Kimba & visa versa.Nothing like getting it on down in the jungleSkimpy leopard loincloths revealing whatDrives Acquanetta & the queens crazy!!!

Bomba’s last film “Lord of the Jungle” (1955)—Has him humping Wayne Morris down on theStudio floor—what’s a guy gotta do to prove he’sStill Lord of the Jungle, my dears. But then likeNothing’s forever whether goodlooks or youth…

He kept only interstitial shots—A loaded glance, a glass beingLifted, palm trees swaying inThe wind, slowing it down toSilent speed, playing a BrazilianMusic record as the soundtrack.

I did the same with Elia Kazan’s—Panic in the Streets (1950), turningThe noir film into underworld ballet.Smoldering passions that onceNever drove the film—slip into theFragmented Big Easy waterfrontDream with Jack Palance as Blackie& Tommy Cook as Vince Poldi theYoung hoodlum punk in love.

Sometimes in the barren wastes—Of talking films a passage occursTo remind one again of the love—The profound & suggestive powerOf the silent film to evoke an idealWorld of male beauty, to releaseUnsuspected floods of images fromThe gaze of a boy’s countenanceIn the prison of straight silver light.

Such film allows for profane poetry—The mute gaze of a boy for a manWhich is profoundly overwhelmingBecause unlike speech, a glance canDescend down deep into gay sublime.

Always momentary, fleeting—Beyond the grasp of most viewers,The look Vince Poldi has for Blackie—Tommy Cook for sexy Jack Palance.

“The movement of the bodies,the conceptualization of artand/as bodies, and the centralityof an urban-modernist milieu allcontributed to Minnelli’s queerrealization of the cinematicexperience.”—David Gerstner,“The Queer Frontier: VincenteMinnelli’s Cabin in the Sky,”Manly Arts: Masculinity andNation in Early American Cinema

If “Cabin in the Sky” is a film—Significant as cultural by-productOf New York City’s sophisticatedand queer black aesthetics…

Sunday, July 17, 2011

“Not many years beforeTitanic sank in 1912,Thorstein Veblen wrote inThe Theory of the LeisureClass that the ‘modernFeminine’…leaves noalternate direction in whichthe impulse to purposefulaction may find expression.”—David Gerstner, “Unsinkable Masculinity:The Artist and the Work of Art in JamesCameron’s Titanic,” The Titanic in Mythand Memory: Representations inVisual and Literary Culture

Perhaps one could say today—The same thing about the excessesOf the Faggotization of Hollywood &Queering of American Film Culture?

One only has to YouTube it—Back to the original Titanic (1953)With fastidious nelly Clifton WebbCruising cute boyish Robert Wagner.

Along with Barbara Stanwyck—Thelma Ritter, Audrey Dalton andA bunch of other bitter old queens onThat doomed Luxury Liner of Death.